Grace through the fog

I do like Norn Irish culture after all. Some of it anyway - I can see the grace. On Thursday afternoon because of the fog, my 18:45 flight from Birmingham was delayed and we ended up at 20:30 (having been in the airport 3 hours) being checked onto coaches to Manchester where our plane was waiting to take us to Belfast International from whence we'd have a coach to Belfast City - our destination! (In the end I got to my parents' at 02:00.) Fun. But all the while the bunch of us was laughing and joking about it. Which is a refreshing perspective that I do my best to cultivate - I mean, in the grand scale of things, what's a few hours in an airport or coach? But I don't usually suceed at getting the English on board with this! Whereas it only took one joking comment and we were all away among the Norn Irish returnees. I do like this Norn Irish attitude: the laid-backness, the making a joke of everything, the not taking ourselves too seriously. In some areas anyway...

And I was very glad that I'd thought at the last minute to pop my mp3 player in my handbag - if one has to travel for 2 hours up the M6 after 3 hours in an airport, doing so to the sound of Lou Fellingham's Treasure album and Piper on Sustaining Grace has got to rock.

So, from the ridiculous to the sublime there is grace: from a measure of grace in each culture to sovereign sustaining grace in Christ. Piper's quatrian on sustaining grace is worth learning:

Not grace to bar what is not bliss,
Nor flight from all distress, but this:
The grace that orders our trouble and pain
and then, in the darkness, is there to sustain.